Sluishuis, Amsterdam, via Wikipedia . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing Thanks to California’s Prop 13, which limits annual property tax increases to 2% over the most recent sales prices, a very large (and increasing) fraction of homes in California are transferred through inheritance. “About 18%...

Have you heard that the age of hyper-personal software is upon us? Typically what people mean is that agentic AI allows the creation of simple and small software built by individuals, often not super technical individuals, to solve a personal problem. As a result, we will see this explosion of software and the death of SaaS. Naysayers point to the lack of many new software projects being launched as proof that agentic AI is all hype. It’s not hype. It’s just that much of this software ...

After seeing Oliver Ettlin's 39C3 presentation Excuse me, what precise time is It? , I wanted to replicate the PTP ( Precision Time Protocol ) clock he used live to demonstrate PTP clock sync: I pinged him on LinkedIn inquiring about the build (I wasn't the only one!), and shortly thereafter, he published Gemini2350/ptp-wallclock , a repository with rough instructions for the build, and his C++ application to display PTP time (if available on the network) on a set of two LED matrix disp...

Recovery from major surgery is not a single event. It's a long, strange hallway of days that blur together, punctuated by vital checks and medication schedules and the weird glow of hospital curtains at 4 AM. I've written about the surgery itself , about the medication dreams , and about how to survive a hospital stay . But there's something I haven't talked about yet: what I actually did with the noise in my head during the worst of it. At 4 AM, when the painkillers are wearing off...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Eric Schwarz, whose blog can be found at schwarztech.net . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? Hi! I'm Eric Schwarz and my online "home" has...

Over the past few months it's become clear that coding agents are extraordinarily good at building a weird version of a "clean room" implementation of code. The most famous version of this pattern is when Compaq created a clean-room clone of the IBM BIOS back in 1982 . They had one team of engineers reverse engineer the BIOS to create a specification, then handed that specification to another team to build a new ground-up version. This process used to take multiple teams of engineers weeks ...

If you love building things, and the process of building is just as important to you as the result itself, it’s not unreasonable that you’re in a slump these days. The world is telling you that your thinking process is extraneous, unnecessary, and must be commoditized and compressed. But you are multidimensional, you need room to touch the code, to explore, to rise above the local minima. In engineering, the journey is the destination. The working system in production is our reward, and ...

In discussions of AI and Mathematics, the discussion often goes to mathematical proofs, such as the the  First Proof  challenge. So let's look at the role of proofs in mathematics. Without a proof, you don't even know whether a theorem is true or false. It's not even a theorem until you have a proof, just a conjecture or hypothesis. You might have some intuition but you don't know the hardness of a proof until you find it. Even then that only gives you an upper bound on hardness as someone mig...

All good things must come to an end, and today is that day for one of my projects, the 512kb Club . I started the 512kb Club back in November 2020, so it's been around 5.5 years. It's become a drain and I'm ready to move on. As of today I won't be accepting any new submissions to the project. At the time of writing this, there are 25 PRs open for new submissions, I'll work through them, then will disable the ability to submit pull requests. Over the years there have been nearly 2,000 pull r...

Yes, you’re right AI slop is ruining the internet . Given half a chance AI will delete your inbox or worse (even if you work in Safety and Alignment at Meta): Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw “confirm before acting” and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox. I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb. pic.twitter.com/XAxyRwPJ5R — Summer Yue (@summeryue0) February 23, 2026 Yes, you’re right ...

I have been working on a few new features for Artemis , the calm web reader I maintain. You can read a summary of what’s new below. Organise subscriptions with folders You can now create folders in Artemis. This feature is designed to help you organise websites you follow into separate pages in your reader. To add an author to a folder, go to the Edit page for an author, then scroll down to the “Folder” option: Set a name for the folder to which you want to add the author. Then, save your...

The Internet relies on text formats. Thus, we spend a lot of time producing and consuming data encoded in text. Your web pages are HTML. The code running in them is JavaScript, sent as text (JavaScript source), not as already-parsed code. Your emails, including their attachments, are sent as text (your binary files are sent as text). It does not stop there. The Python code that runs your server is stored as text. It queries data by sending text queries. It often gets back the answer as text ...

Because code gets cheaper and cheaper to write, this includes re-implementations. I mentioned recently that I had an AI port one of my libraries to another language and it ended up choosing a different design for that implementation. In many ways, the functionality was the same, but the path it took to get there was different. The way that port worked was by going via the test suite. Something related, but different, happened with chardet . The current maintainer reimplemented it from scra...

JJ LSP Follow Up Mar 5, 2026 In Majjit LSP , I described an idea of implementing Magit style UX for jj once and for all, leveraging LSP protocol. I’ve learned today that the upcoming 3.18 version of LSP has a feature to make this massively less hacky: Text Document Content Request LSP can now provide virtual documents, which aren’t actually materialized on disk. So this: can now be such a virtual document, where highlighting is provided by semantic tokens, things li...

“When in doubt, follow your nose.” ― The Lord of the Rings As a Lord of the Rings fan, visiting Hobbiton was non-negotiable. Everything was booked out for February, and I was almost considering changing my trip route. Fortunately, there were some external provider tickets left, incl. a bus transfer. This led me to the interesting city of Rotorua . Hobbiton Hobbiton was the village of our favorite hobbits from the Tolkien world. After the filming of The Lord of the Rings ha...

It's been a while since I posted about WASI support in CPython ! 😅 Up until now, most of the work I have been doing around WASI has been making its maintenance easier for me and other core developers. For instance, the cpython-devcontainer repo now provides a WASI dev container so people don't have to install the WASI SDK to be productive (e.g. there's a WASI codespace now so you can work on WASI entirely from your browser without installing anything). All this work around making devel...

A lot of the time, the software I write boils down to three phases: parse some input, run it through a state machine, and persist the result. In this kind of code, you spend a lot of time knitting your error path, hoping that it’d be easier to find the root cause during an incident. This raises the following questions: When to fmt.Errorf("doing X: %w", err) When to use %v instead of %w When to just return err There’s no consensus, and the answer changes depending on the kind...

Picture a bizarre training exercise: A group of runners starts jogging around a circular track, with each runner maintaining a unique, constant pace. Will every runner end up “lonely,” or relatively far from everyone else, at least once, no matter their speeds? Mathematicians conjecture that the answer is yes. The “lonely runner” problem might seem simple and inconsequential, but it crops up… Source Picture a bizarre training exercise: A group of runners starts jogging around a circ...

I've been a reluctant Bank of America customer for over a decade. My parents chose BofA, so I chose BofA. Migrating to Chase or Wells Fargo is more of the same -- not worth the switching cost . Am I really a "customer" when they charge -0.01% interest to hold my money? BofA is clunky . Their physical branches seem simultaneously overstaffed and understaffed. Everybody there is cordial yet confused. I would never visit their physical locations if their app worked, but alas, their app ...

Naresh Jain has long been uncomfortable with software patents. But a direct experience of patent aggression, together with the practical constraints faced by startups, led him to resort to defensive patenting as as a shield in this asymmetric legal environment. more… Naresh Jain has long been uncomfortable with software patents. But a direct experience of patent aggression, together with the practical constraints faced by startups, led him to resort to defen...

I took a voluntary layoff from Google ~200 days ago. I have split my time between software, literature, and governance. Previous articles: One Week of Unemployment Two Weeks of Unemployment One Month Out 136 Days of Unemployment These first 6 months were part sabbatical, part work. I am officially back in the bay since Jan 31st. Here are the things that I have done in these 6 months: Visited USA NYC, Boston, Portsmouth, Ogunquit, Portland (ME), D.C., New Orleans, Austin, Denver Visited Europe Lo...

yt-browse: a powerful youtube search TUI I made a TUI for searching a specific youtube channel. I think it's much nicer than the experience of searching a channel on youtube's website. Read the full post on my blog! Here's a raw link, if you need it: https://eieio.games/blog/yt-browse yt-browse: a powerful youtube search TUI I made a TUI for searching a specific youtube channel. I think it's much nicer than the experience of searching a channel on youtube's website. Read the f...

HARSTAD, Norway (March 3, 2026) – Shield AI, the deep-tech company building state-of-the-art autonomy software products and aircraft, demonstrated Arctic-ready, ship-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities during NATO’s HEIMDALL 26 exercise in Norway.   Hosted by the NATO Center of Excellence for Cold Weather Operations (CEO-CWO) between February 17 and 26, HEIMDALL served as the validation of NATO’s Arctic experimentation arena, evaluating mann...